The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
Different types of communications services are provided by a network appliance. Examples of these services include, but are not limited to, network address translation (NAT), firewall, Internet Protocol Security (IPsec), virtual private network (VPN), or deep packet inspection (DPI) services. To provide one of these services, the network appliance uses service resources of a limited set of service resources of the network appliance.